Archive for November, 2006

This just in…

Published
by
Gianugo
on November 7, 2006
in English, Open Source and Work stuff
. 1 Comment

Simon Phipps is coming to talk in our upcoming Open Source Business Academy, as you might already know. He just sent in an updated title for his talk, the new one being:

“The Zen of Free: The Philosophy behind the Open Sourcing of Java“ (emphasis mine)

Wow. We all knew it was coming one day or the other, but it makes quite a difference to see it written as an official Sun speech. I’m thrilled to see this is happening during our event, as this is the first time I hear this (variation of the) title. Looks like Milano,  November 21st, is the place to be!

Legitimacy and Open Source

Published
by
Gianugo
on November 7, 2006
in English and Work stuff
. 2 Comments

A press release hit my inbox today. Looks like we have a competitor, a brand new Open Source system integrator operating in one of our target markets. You’ll see why I’m not linking to them in a minute.

Competition is good, of course, and I’m seriously convinced that Open Source needs more dedicated players to thrive. Of course, as an entrepreneur, at a certain point I need to stop looking at the big picture, and consider how a specific competitor might be a threat. I did my homework and read the press release carefully: I skimmed through the usual self celebrating yadda-yadda, the ritual business mumbo-jumbo and the expected “so what?” moments, to try and understand who was behind the new kid on the block. I stumbled on the Managing Director name: didn’t ring any bell. Carried on to the Technical Director guy: never heard of him. Finished with the Sales Director, another Mr. Cellophane.

Oh well, Open Source is a big pond after all, and it would be arrogant to think I know each and every guy out there. But hey, Google is your friend, isn’t it? I went to my fellow browser and started looking for the guys: the managing director scores a whopping 25 page hits, with only two being relevant (a couple profiles on social network sites). The 879 page hits for the Technical Director seem to suggest we’re talking about a wedding pianist from Georgia. Their sales director hits 2 million pages, but most of them are devoted to a filmmaker and photojournalist who shares his (fairly common) name. Well, it all makes sense in the end: circulating a press release about an Open Source company in Microsoft Word format fits the picture just fine. I shouldn’t worry, after all, and you should see by now why I don’t even bother linking to my new “colleagues”.

Well, shouldn’t I, actually? Seeing how easy is for these guys to toot the Open Source horn when they are all talk and a press release is somehow making me consider we are missing a way to understand who might be a good and experienced partner and supplier of Open Source technologies instead of someone who has just been playing with Spring and Hibernate in the past few years. The good old proprietary software world had a few tools to perform an initial skimming through: certifications, partner programs and training qualification, which were able to provide System Integrators with nice badges for their reception desk and a logo for the site. Of course most commercial Open Source vendors have a training/certification/partner program, but is that enough to qualify a shop as Open Source savy?

I don’t think so. Open Source is so much more than just knowing a technology. Someone looking for Open Source help shouldn’t worry about technology alone, as the questions that need an answer are more relevant and broad, such as:

  • will the guys I’m hiring be able to interact with the Open Source communities?
  • if I need to patch an Open Source software, will my consultants know how to have it integrated in the next release?
  • is my system integrator able to provide support with Open Source licenses?
  • can my partner help me in software selection, perform a community evaluation, assess the legal status of a project and provide me with adequate risk management when it comes to building a solution?
  • will the company I choose help me grab not just the low hanging fruits of Open Source, but also the strategic advantage built around lock-in mitigation, developer motivation and organic participation to the virtuous cycle of Open Source?

I’m strongly convinced all this is much more important than the “do the guys have JBoss experience?” question. Answering those questions isn’t easy and requires a strong experience in Open Source projects. A company, by definition, doesn’t participate as itself in communities, but employees do, and this is one of the most relevant metrics to consider when choosing an Open Source partner. The number of people involved in Open Source communities is a clear indicator of how a consulting shop is tied and committed to Open Source, and a definite source of legitimation to proposing Open Source based solutions. We care a lot about this, and we can proudly say we have a rich set of Open Source community members in the company. Yes, I’m fiercely trying to say we’re different and better, but I have a strong reason for that: considering Open Source is more and more a question of corporate strategy rather than just cost-saving tactics. Choosing the right partner is key, and that’s definitely someone with a lot of experience, coming from their developers of course, in the Open Source world. Ask for the track record!

Lies, damn lies, and book sales

Published
by
Gianugo
on November 6, 2006
in English and Open Source
. 1 Comment

I learn via Matt that the Tim O’Reilly has been posting his updated state on the computer books market. I have to confess I don’t quite see why those data are in such a high consideration as technology trend indicators. Other than seeing a value for book sellers (good for planning their business, indeed), judging technology adoption from book sales looks to me like doing weather forecasts by looking at the sky behind a curtain: good enough if you’re figuring out what to do with your umbrella, but that’s almost it.

Looking at Tim’s data, it seems Java is on a declining curve, while C# and .Net are on the rise. Apart from being a scenario I’m not experiencing (Java is clearly still the strongest player in the enterprise market), what we should read in that analysis is just that book sales for C# are stronger than the Java ones. It’s easy to explain that, though, if you consider the following:

  • Java is well established and mainstream. One can clearly imagine how the need for general Java books is declining, if you just consider the saturation effect. C# and .Net are still ramping up in the adoption curve, so it’s no surprise their book sales are better: people looking for generic books don’t hunt for Java anymore, as the Java section of their bookshelf is probably filled up already;
  • Java is nowadays about the “long tail”. The neat stuff isn’t big anymore: there are a lot of small gems  (libraries, frameworks, tools, plugins, applications, you name it) gathering a lot of attention, yet nearly none of them is big enough to justify more than a few tutorials, some articles, and maybe an instant book or two. The interest in C#/.Net is still about the language and the surrounding framework, and that’s book galore;
  • the book industry as a whole is clearly declining as more and more information gets on the Web. The small room left for books is about reference stuff and manuals that last for more than the time it takes to write, find, order, ship and read them. Why bother buying a book on framework X, when in six months time it will be more than outdated? Java nowadays is more about frameworks and user-space software/libraries than about the language itself, and that’s not stuff for books.

Given the reasons above, I’m actually quite surprised to see how Java is just going through a small decline which smells stabilization to me. While as a publisher I wouldn’t bet on many new Java books, as someone who needs to place a bet on technologies, those results are a clear sign of very good health for Java.

The Sunday post: dumplings, dedication and passion

Published
by
Gianugo
on November 5, 2006
in Cooking and English
. Closed

This post begins a new category devoted to cooking experiences. My rather stressful life requires a few moments for myself, where I’m able to devote my brain to something different that requires concentration and dedication: in the past few months I found myself doing more cooking and enjoying it a lot. Finding the recipe, getting the right ingredients, slicing, dicing and – finally – cooking is a great way to move from the virtual electrons on my computer screen to something tangible that shapes up in front of me, with the full glory of smell, texture, temperature and appearance. A great source of relax, which I thought I could share on this blog.

Proper cooking requires time, and this is why I indulge in it only on weekends, typically on Sunday, hence the title for this and all subsequent posts. Don’t expect formal recipes, though: you’ll see stories, anecdotes, jokes and tales of an amateur cook.

This category requires me to break a rule I set to myself: as much as I hate splitting the posts into summaries and body, I have to consider how most of my readers aren’t coming over here for cooking stuff. As this kind of posts need quite a bit of room to breathe, I will have to swallow my pride and have just summaries flying around. Feel free to come over here anytime to read the full story, of course.

Without further ado, then, here comes a tale of passion, dedication and dumplings.
Continue reading ‘The Sunday post: dumplings, dedication and passion’

… then you win?

Published
by
Gianugo
on November 5, 2006
in English and Open Source
. 1 Comment

These days everyone is talking about the Novell/Microsoft deal. I’ve been reading a few comments, yet it’s difficult to understand what will be the final outcome of the new scenario in front of us: are we all doomed, or is this the beginning of a new era for Open Source? While the jury is out, I can’t help thinking along the lines of Mohandas Gandhi and his all-famous quote:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

The problem is now understanding whether Open Source hit the “you win” phase or if we just entered a new phase of the fight. For one, I can clearly see a great value in Microsoft acknowledging Open Source: I’m grown up enough not to believe in the tooth fairy of Microsoft drones selling Linux to their customers, but still having a written statement from Ballmer stating that Linux has a place in the IT ecosystem is quite an accomplishment. Not that we, and the IT world outside Redmond, didn’t know as of yet, but still it has a value.

The flip side of the coin, unfortunately, is a stroke of genius of Ballmer and friends, as they managed to inject a notable size of FUD in the average IT buyer. After the wreckage of the SCO lawsuit and their stupid attempt to turn the tables of patents, IP and Open Source, Microsoft has been able to avoid an explicit face off with the Open Source community by using rule #1 of marketing and sales: describe negative connotation in terms of positive statements. Instead of saying “one of these days we are going to sue your ass off”, they are stating that using SuSe won’t cause any litigation from their side. What that sentence really means is that the sheer majority of Linux users should consider themselves at risk, as they can and might sue at will whoever doesn’t use Novell’s Linux distribution.

And wait, there is more: keeping up with the idea of speaking in positive terms, Microsoft agrees not to sue developers operating in their private non-professional capacity. This interesting statement brings two powerful weapons to the revamped ship of Borg: other than carrying the hidden message that they might sue any professional Open Source developer, this statement is really an impressive way to subliminally downplay Open Source as amateur stuff produced by hobbyists they shouldn’t care about. All this without giving up their ability to threaten and possibly sue developers, as the vast majority of them is somehow tied to Open Source in a professional fashion. Chapeau, Microsoft.

My overall reading of the announcement, though, is far from being negative, even though I wouldn’t cling to RedHat stocks in the short term. What I see between the lines is not only Microsoft being scared of Open Source (it’s no news to us): they are now recognizing the need to interoperate, as per customer demand. Nevermind the results, as I don’t think we’ll see anything other than minor stuff coming from the joint Microsoft-Novell labs, this is an important statement in itself. Last but not least, from the legal front, it’s clear how Microsoft is reluctant to fight a court battle suing final customers on the argument of patents. While they’re making a point in saying that they might have defendable IP in some Open Source codebases, their attempt to sell their rights as an upfront insurance fee to Linux vendors is to me a tell-tale sign of how they are, after all, unwilling to face the backlash and the odds SCO has been going through. Yes, they might, but no, they won’t: it’s business as usual in Open Source-land.

New blog template

Published
by
Gianugo
on November 2, 2006
in English
. Closed

Given my current statistics, there is a good chance you’ll be reading this from an aggy or a planet, but I won’t refrain from the usual “I have a new template” post anyways. My wife has been working on it since we both got bored from the nice yet abused “connections” theme: I wanted something that was orange and grey (guess why…) and she came up with the idea of adapting the “coffee cup 101” design to my orange mood.

All this with a twist, of course. The picture above come from our collection and are being adjusted to match the overall tone of the site. Thanks to some server side bash-fu, the picture will rotate every day, showing a different view of our small little world (my French friends will be pleased in noticing it’s mostly about our recent french vacation for the time being).

Guess I don’t have any more excuses to refrain from regular posting, now.